Extinction Rebellion

Noam Chomsky said we need to “…try to develop mass popular action which will compel people within the existing institutions to act
differently … and at the same time try to educate the public to understand that there are deep institutional problems that have to be
changed.”

Youth climate activists as young as 7 years old confronted California Senator Dianne Feinstein last week in San Francisco, demanding she sign
on to the Green New Deal. We speak with 12-year-old Rio and his sister, 10-year-old Magdalena, who were among the protesters who spoke to Senator
Feinstein. They are members of Earth Guardians San Francisco Bay Area Crew.

I first learned words like greenhouse effect, chlorophyll, photo synthesis, population explosion, global warming, and sea level rise,
back in 1966, when I was a child. My Fourth Grade teacher had been to the 1962 Century 21 Exposition in Seattle. She talked about it a lot. She
even spent her own money to buy an SRA Reading Laboratory Kit.

Science was valued. We went to the moon like three years later for crying out loud!!!

Science Research Associates Inc. was founded in 1938. Early on, it had a
trade and occupational focus. In 1957, it moved into individualized classroom instruction with the iconic SRA Reading Laboratory Kit, a format that
later translated to mathematics, science, and social studies. Commonly called SRA cards, the labs were large boxes filled with color-coded cardboard
sheets. Each sheet included a reading exercise for students. Each student would have an independent topic, and would work on it independently of the
other students in the class, consulting with the teacher only if they got stuck. The student would then follow up with multiple choice questions. As
the child moved ahead, he or she would advance in difficulty.

Environmental activists argue the only way to stop the impending ecocide is to carry out nonviolent acts of civil disobedience to shut down
the capitals of the major industrial countries, crippling commerce and transportation, until the ruling elites are forced to publicly state the truth
about climate catastrophe, implement radical measure to halt carbon emissions by 2025, and empower an independent citizens committee to oversee the
termination of our 150-year binge on fossil fuels. The British-based group, Extinction Rebellion, has called for nonviolent acts of civil disobedience
on April 15 in capitals around the world to reverse our “one-way track to extinction.” Joining Chris Hedge in a two-part discussion from London is
Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion.

“So much of what we talk about is so dire and so extreme and so scary and also disheartening that I quote Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident
writer and statesman. And he reminds us that as he said, ‘Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that
something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.” And that’s where I get into this moral obligation that no matter how dire things look, that
we are absolutely morally obliged to do everything we can in our power to try to make this better.” Dahr Jamail, author of “The End of
Ice”

For the past several months, students around the world have joined the #FridaysForFuture school strike launched last year by Swedish teenager Greta
Thunberg, whose solitary protests outside her country’s parliament — inspired by the Parkland students advocating for stricter gun laws in the
United States — generated headlines that helped spur the global youth climate movement.

There are a lot of links on the page. I can't put them all here because March 15 is tomorrow. Sense of urgency and all!

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